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CBS’s “Survivor,” the iconic survival-themed social competition series, launched its 50th season this year into a very different world than the one in which it premiered. When its first season became a sensation in the summer of 2000, American culture was shot through with a particularly rancid strain of misogyny with which we are only now beginning to reckon. While we have always wrestled with sexism in this country, it is hard to describe to a young person today (who has grown up with feminist movements and voices as societally prominent) just how conspicuous and disgusting this misogyny was in the 2000s, and how disrespected attempts to counter it were.
“Survivor” has run continuously on CBS since 2000, airing two seasons every year (excepting a pandemic-induced break). It has stayed on the air alongside various social upheavals, and it has both reflected and produced examples of the developing societal concerns of its time. When that first season aired, it was promoted as a “social experiment”; how will sixteen ordinary Americans deal with a simulation of harsh survival conditions? While the pretense of the social experiment fell away as the series developed into a more explicitly gamified competition, it’s still worthwhile to look at “Survivor”as a product of American social conditions. The show is designed around a mechanic where competitors have regular opportunities to vote other players out of the show. As originally conceived, the player voted out would represent a “weak link,” someone hurting the ability of the others to continue “surviving.”
While this approach to vote-offs fell away as the show’s social gameplay developed (it eventually became more common to keep weak players around to use as pawns in alliances), women were still frequently made into early targets. A woman was the first boot in 31 out of the show’s first 49 seasons. In the early days, when casts featured more age diversity, older women in particular were frequently taken out as soon as possible; teams considered them easy targets to arrange consensus votes around. After a while, the show stopped casting older women altogether—it was simply a matter of course that they wouldn’t last very long. Older men are still cast from time to time, though. For male “Survivor” competitors, aging is shown to confer wisdom, experience, and toughness. For women on “Survivor,” getting older does you no good.
Though “Survivor” is a reality show, it is more productive to think of its cast members in terms of how they are portrayed in a narrative sense. The producers select competitors with certain archetypes in mind and then edit them to become television characters; in other words, the show deliberately produces certain images of American women. So, what does the 21st-century American woman look like according to “Survivor?” Numerous character types have been observed by viewers and described by producer Mark Burnett: “Cheerleaders” and “Beauty Queens” cast primarily for their looks, though if these women get too strategic or socially manipulative, they’re instead portrayed as “Femme Fatales.” “Crazy Cat Ladies” are older and kookier. The “Team Mom” is supportive but passive. Athletic women are “Sporty.” There are many personality types here, but a consistent picture does emerge: “Survivor” women are portrayed positively when they lean into being social, nurturing, and friendly; they are portrayed negatively if they engage in manipulation or intense gameplay. There are male casting archetypes too, of course, but the show tends to lean into macho images: men who manipulate are Machiavellian geniuses; men who physically dominate are superheroes.
At first blush, “Survivor” might appear to be a surprisingly egalitarian competition. Twenty-eight seasons have been won by men and 21 by women, though those numbers were more lopsided prior to the “new era” begun in 2021. From the beginning, the show has had an equal number of male and female competitors, and in the early days this led to a more or less equal division of winners. Its first ten seasons were won by five women and five men, and there were three female winners in a row between seasons 6 and 8. Still, we find some interesting examples of bias in this period. Consider the show’s first two winners: Richard Hatch and Jerri Manthey. Both played games characterized by deceit and backstabbing, but while editors portrayed Hatch as a brilliant schemer, Manthey was portrayed as a man-eating villainess. She was the first “Survivor” veteran to speak out about the ways that the show used editing to reduce real people into stereotypes. When Manthey and Hatch returned for “Survivor All-Stars” in 2004, Manthey’s comments got her loudly booed at the live reunion show. Hatch, who had driven fellow competitor Susan Hawk to quit the season after he molested her during a challenge, received a comparatively warmer reception.
For the middle seasons of the show, men began to win significantly more often than women; this period coincided with an increased focus on “advantage” items, which players could use to alter gameplay in powerful ways. These advantages rewarded more aggressive play, which ran counter to the tendency of female players to orient their approaches around social connection. In season 19, “Samoa,” the producers had what seemed to be their ideal player in Russell Hantz. He was brash, bold, and totally ruthless, controlling the entire cast like a puppet master. He played the kind of “Survivor” game that the show likes to promote: highly strategic and advantage-focused. In an unprecedented move, they cast Hantz to play again on the very next season, putting him back on the island before he even knew if he’d won “Samoa.” In fact, “Samoa” was won by Natalie White, whom Hantz had allied with early on in the hopes of using her as an easy final opponent. But Hantz alienated his fellow players with his hostile play and confrontational personality, while White flew under the radar and stayed on good terms with everyone. Not knowing he had lost “Samoa,” Hantz tried the same strategy on the next season, “Heroes vs. Villains,” with Sandra Diaz-Twine. It led to the same result, with Diaz-Twine becoming the first person to win “Survivor” twice. The show may have taken pains to positively portray more “masculine” playstyles, but Hantz’s back-to-back losses demonstrated an increasing distaste for them among players.
This dynamic came to a head in the late 2010s. In one particularly egregious example, Cirie Fields (considered the best “Survivor” player to never win the game) was voted off of season 34 because every other player had an advantage that they could use to keep themselves immune, meaning Fields was the only person it was possible to vote for. In season 39, contestant Dan Spilo received constant complaints from female players about him touching them inappropriately. Producers took little action besides telling him to stop, and while an agreement was made among the remaining women to vote Spilo out at the first opportunity, a few of them decided to use the situation as a gameplay advantage and voted out his primary accuser, Kellee Kim, instead. Spilo was later removed from the show after sexually harassing one of the producers. In season 40, the landmark all-winners “Winners at War,” Sarah Lacina lamented to host Jeff Probst that he and the show at large celebrated men for playing aggressively while framing women who played the same way in much more negative terms. It was clear that the culture of the show needed to change, and the year-long production break forced by Covid gave it an opportunity to do just that.
This “new era,” which began alongside MeToo and other culturally progressive shifts, is extremely conscious of the history of “Survivor.” The response to the various controversies and debacles of the last decade has been to orient the show around a pop-feminist perspective. The show’s editors began to craft narratives around “emotional journeys” rather than gameplay aggression. The competitors cast on the show started having milder personalities—it became common for vote-offs to end in hugs instead of curses. In season 41, Probst openly asked the cast if they felt the catchphrase he had always used to bring people into challenges (“Come on in, guys”) was exclusionary; he decided to start saying “come on in” instead. This kinder, sanded-down version of “Survivor” has led to some fan backlash from people who miss the days of intense drama and clashing personalities.
Modern “Survivor” wants to portray an America where cooperation is paramount and difference is invisible, yet America today is more divided, angry, and volatile than when the show began. The show is self-aware enough about its past to make an effort to no longer passively reflect society, instead endeavoring to produce more positive images of it. But it has felt, in recent years, as though the show’s response to Sarah Lacina’s critique in “Winners at War” has been to tone down on aggression and manipulation across the board, rather than changing how the show depicted that kind of gameplay from women. The idea that a more gender-inclusive and fair-minded “Survivor” must necessarily feature less drama and conflict is no less patronizing than the show’s original pigeonholing of women as nurturers or seductresses. American society has made room for more complex and nuanced ideas of what women can be. It’s past time “Survivor” did the same.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/KPayUQu
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